Shattered
by WitchcraftAndTrickery
Summary: "He's gone. He's gone and you can't save him this time." - A Post-Reichenbach songfic set to Shattered by Trading Yesterday. John's POV. Very angsty.


_**Disclaimer: John Watson, Sherlock Holmes are the property of Arthur Conan Doyle. Anything affiliated with BBC Sherlock belongs to Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. I think. Anyway, they're not mine. *sigh***_

Shattered

John sits in the armchair, gazing emptily at the blank television screen. It is black. Not a true black, more of a dull grey. A dead colour, a lifeless colour. Black, real black, had spirit. He had had spirit, and he had worn black. And John knows that if he turns that greyness into colour, the images will kill him. He wants to wrap himself in grey and black so as to escape the outside.

_Yesterday I died, tomorrow's bleeding -  
Fall into your sunlight._

He hadn't been a normal man. He had been a strange man. A cruel man, some had said. A mad man, according to others. John had seen the cruelty. He had seen the darkness. But he had seen the desperation. The dark that was struggling against a sea of lights. John had thought that he was the shadow connecting the darkness and the light; the levee protecting the coast from the flood. And yet a tsunami had been building, and yesterday the coast had fallen into the sea, leaving the levee crumbling away.

_The future's open wide, beyond believing  
To know why hope dies._

John hadn't meant to befriend the stranger. He hadn't meant to grow attached to him, or accustomed to his idiosyncrasies, his habits. But the strange man in the long coat with the razor cheekbones had presented a world to full of danger and excitement and vitality, that the soldier had been pulled in. Because he wasn't just an extraordinary man: he was a sad man, a lonely man, even if he didn't know it himself.

And now John stares at a blank screen, finally understanding why he had been so drawn to the isolated individual.

_Losing what was found, a world so hollow -  
Suspended in a compromise._

He had given John purpose, given him a charge – John had always felt better with a duty. The army taught him that. The men who came back bloodied and ragged, with limbs or eyes missing. They needed him. And now this man needed him. And he'd be damned if he was giving up on that duty. The man was a child to John, but also alien. Wise and immature. Insane and exceptional.

John stares still, hating to fail a duty.

_The silence of this sound is soon to follow -  
Somehow, sundown._

A clatter from downstairs. John doesn't flinch. Just someone else trying to cope. To make sense of the stranger in their midst. To understand the hand that had been dealt to them. The shadowy man touched all he met – with scorn, with amusement, with irritation, with compassion. No one forgot the man with the dark hair and eerie eyes.

John cannot forget it as he stares into nothing.

_Finding answers is forgetting all the questions we call home,  
And passing the graves of the unknown._

He had been a puzzle. A riddle that could never be solved. A maze without an end. Of all the mysteries he solved, he remained the biggest one of all. John had begun to believe he held the secret to the answers. But then the key had been torn from his hand, the lock snapped back shut by a shadowy hand.

_As reason clouds my eyes, with splendour fading -  
Illusions of the sunlight._

John won't concentrate on the benevolence. The poetry of him was all in his darkness, not his light. John still remembers the biting words, the sharp glares, the veiled insults. The hurt he'd quashed, the anger he'd allowed. The times he had tried to leave, but found himself inexplicably drawn back. To the man with the glassy eyes who needed him more than he would admit.

_And the reflection of a lie will keep me waiting -  
Love gone for so long._

But then he remembers the sporadic laughter that synchronised together, the hidden smiles, the approving nods, the amused smirks. The shared jokes that only they understood. The irritation at feeling confused, the burning desire to understand. To see as he saw. The annoying habits that became affectionate jests. The terrible coffee.

_This day's ending is the proof of time killing all the faith I know,  
Knowing that faith is all I hold._

The sun sinks lower in the sky. This will be the second night John goes to his room without bidding farewell, without watching a thin frame disappear through a different door, without that nagging curiosity in the back of his mind. Making one coffee instead of two.

With the autonomy of a man who has done the same for years, John stands, turns, draws the curtains, turns again, and sits back down. The clock chimes ten. He stands once more.

_And I've lost who I am,  
And I can't understand_

John makes his way out of the room, toward the stairs. The door is shut. He hasn't been able to look inside it. Now he reaches out tentatively. The handle is cold. Terribly cold.

_Why my heart is so broken,  
Rejecting your love._

It turns in his hand. The door opens soundlessly. There. John is inside. He never spent much time in here, only when he had to. A wry smile tugs at John's mouth. You can tell. The curtains are still drawn. Letting some light or air inside never concerned him. John had tried his best, but the man was set in his ways.

_Without love gone wrong  
Lifeless words carry on,_

Everything is at it was that morning. Shirts are over the floor. Bedclothes are thrown across the frame. It is all typically 'him'. John sinks down onto the mattress. His hands shake. He hasn't seen that in a long while.

_But I know, all I know  
Is that the end's beginning._

**He isn't coming back**. Those words run laps around John's mind. **He's gone**. **He's gone and you can't save him this time**.

_Who I am from the start,  
Take me home to my heart._

John feels his hands balling into fists to stop the tremor. His lips press together, his breathing quickens. He wants to shout and swear at the idiot for doing it. He wants to hit him. But all he can do is sit with his fists clenched around air as droplets escape his eyes, leaving salty stains on his weathered cheeks as they run their own races.

_Let me go, and I will run,  
I will not be silenced._

The newspaper is still on the cabinet. The fury and the pain that has been rising in John like a wave overflows, and he tears the printed paper into hundreds of pieces. People's faces, odd letters, numbers and small words flutter past him like cruel confetti as he sits watching the paper fly.

_All this time spent in vain,  
Wasted years, wasted gain._

John knows the truth. He knows the reality. And everyone will know. They have to know. Because John spent the best years of his life with him and he will never know. Neither of them can ever know. The chance has been lost and the curtain has closed, and John cannot stop the flow of tears tracking his face.

_All is lost, hope remains  
And this war's not over._

He stands, marching to the door, leaving the paper strewn over the bed and floor like snow. As he slams the wood into the frame, a few pieces flutter around, seemingly oblivious to how John has just fallen to his knees outside. An agonising pain shoots up his left leg, and it gives way beneath him.

**No**. **Not again**.

_There's a light, there's the sun  
Taking all the shattered ones_

It can't be. He doesn't have a leg injury. He knows that. He doesn't need the stick. He never needed it with him. John knows he is stronger than this. He scrambles to his feet, the pain throbbing more in his head than his knee. Clutching the banister to the stairs, he closes his eyes.

_To the place we belong  
And his love will conquer._

Only his face appears in John's mind. His eyes shining when he discovered something, his brow rising when he was unimpressed, his lip curling when he was amused. The strange expression John would find him with when they caught each other's eye. And now he'll never get to ask what that expression was for.

_And his love will conquer all._

Because he's gone. John pulls himself up the stairs, swearing at every flare of pain in his knee. His stick is in his room. He brings it out, leaning on the familiar handle with a sense of loss.

What mattered most had gone. What pained him most had returned. And what's worst was that he knew it was in his head. But it was still real.

_Yesterday I died, tomorrow's bleeding –  
Fall into your sunlight._

Because he was dead. His friend, Sherlock Holmes – the world's greatest and only consulting detective – was dead.

_**Okay, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed! If you hadn't already noticed, this was something of a practise in metaphors and philosophical writing techniques. I hope it wasn't too flowery, and I hope I managed to keep John in character – I wanted to keep him BAMF-y, but absolutely decimated.**_

_**Oh, and the Return Of The Killer Psychosomatic Limp is my head-canon. Lyrics are 'Shattered' by Trading Yesterday.**_

_**Reviews, please, I like them lots….**_


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